What Makes Science Successful?

The Intelligibility of Nature: How Science Makes Sense of the
World. Peter Dear. xii + 242 pp. University of Chicago Press,
2006. $27.50.

In The Intelligibility of Nature, Peter Dear explores two
aspects of science: its concern with explaining and understanding
the natural world (science as natural philosophy), and its claim to
practical efficacy (science as engineering or manipulation). To
illustrate these aspects, the book surveys a few high points in the
history of science from Newton to the present. It begins with a
brief nod to Aristotle, pointing out that he (and his followers over
the centuries) understood natural processes to be "directed
towards a goal." Dear then jumps forward to modern science,
which began in the 17th century by repudiating Aristotle's
teleology. Toward the end of the book, he tells us that, ironically,
in modern biology "teleological explanation remains alive and
well. . . . The only difference is that God is not invoked; natural
selection plays the same role." In Dear's accounting, the
displacement of words by other words ("God" by
"natural selection," for example) is one key to unlocking
the rhetoric employed by science to explain the natural world.

How does science manage both to make nature intelligible and to make
us believe in its own effectiveness? Dear sees as crucial the
complex interplay of theory (natural philosophy) and its handmaiden,
instrumentality (the aim of creating material control over nature).
Sometimes theory holds sway. Against all doubters, both Newton and
Lavoisier argued that their respective theories, backed by
quantitative work, should be sufficient to account for phenomena.
Armored by theory, their versions of science eventually came to
dominate. Other, less audacious, 18th-century practitioners of
taxonomy, natural history, botany and astronomy relied less on
natural philosophy and more on classification—on empirical
observing and cataloguing.

In the mid-19th century, with the arrival of natural selection as a
concept, natural philosophy returned in full force. Later, Einstein
opted for intuition and thought experiments. His ultimate goal was
to ensure a natural-philosophical physics that could "speak
about a world that existed independently of the human
observer," whereas his rival Bohr wanted a "scientific
truth that was relative to the nature of human cognition" and,
of course, experimentation. Indebted to their theorists, both modern
cosmology and evolutionary biology grant natural philosophy
"intellectual priority over efficacy."

An interrogation of how knowledge accumulates and acquires validity
over time lies at the heart of any critical examination of the
success of science, or of any discipline, for that matter. Most
critics would begin their analysis of the knowledge claims made with
a set of questions more inclusive than those Dear brings to his
investigation of the prestige of the natural sciences. In his
analysis, only two elements count: natural-philosophical positions
and claims about instrumentality—that is, theories and
efficacy, which conspire and interweave:

Why are science's instrumental techniques effective? The
usual answer is: by virtue of science's (true) natural philosophy.
How is science's natural philosophy shown to be true, or at least
likely? The answer: by virtue of science's (effective) instrumental
capabilities. Such is the belief, amounting to an ideology, by which
science is understood in modern culture. It is circular, but
invisibly so.

Readers are apparently expected to conclude that, although other
disciplines that accumulate knowledge display many factors that
explain their relative effectiveness or success, science alone is
solely about theories and methods of inquiry. Truth or lesser
falsity cannot explain science's success, nor can the replication of
experimental methods and results. And the historical circumstances,
or context, that may have shaped the science are also irrelevant.

Let's see how this approach works for the history of 17th-century
science. Once, when Aristotle held sway, natural philosophy was seen
as distantly related to instrumentality and superior to it.
Gradually, thanks to Bacon, Descartes and especially Newton,
"doing things and understanding things . . . became
increasingly folded into one another." The resulting ideas we
have today about nature "are all shaped by our acceptance of
the images of reality that we owe to science in its guise as natural
philosophy." If we assign intelligibility to the world, it is
because science has "powerful social authority . . ., which
serves to render most people unable to refuse a knowledge-claim
presented as a 'scientific fact.'"

In this book, the science that triumphed in early modern Europe did
so largely by the rhetorical force that established the
intelligibility of its natural philosophy. Dear ignores the enormous
difficulties that the Aristotelian doctrine of forms presented by
the late 1500s to thinkers from a wide range of philosophical
positions. Also absent is any reference to the religious
context—to the work that scholasticism (based on a reading of
Aristotle) did for Catholic doctrine—or to the historical
context, in which English Protestants such as Bacon, Boyle and
Newton saw Catholicism associated with royal absolutism as a threat
to England's survival as a Protestant nation. Needless to say, Dear
does not attribute the success of the new science to what Galileo
said he saw with his telescope, or what Boyle observed in the vacuum
he thought he had created with his air pump, or what Newton spied
with his prisms.

Not examining the historical context allows Dear to claim that when
Newton furiously denied the "absurdity" that gravity could
be "innate, inherent, and essential to matter," he was
trying to save the intelligibility of his natural philosophy. But
Newton's actual reason for denouncing that view was different: He
was concerned because freethinkers had found ways to use the
intelligibility of his natural philosophy as a powerful tool to
assert the validity of materialism and pantheism, both of which
undercut the Christianity so vital to his life and thought. Failure
to see the importance of religious crises—brought about on one
hand by the materialism extracted from Newton's science and on the
other by the threat of Catholicism—obscures Newton's motives,
many of which were shared by his religious contemporaries.

Curiously, when the book gets to Darwin, Dear offers no account of
the philosophical underpinning of natural selection. Materialism,
which was by then ascendant despite efforts to defeat it, enabled
Darwin to imagine vast, even unlimited quantities of time wherein
randomness unfolded. But in Dear's account, Darwin relies not so
much on an intellectual commitment to natural philosophy as on
imagination. Rhetorical and imaginative forces carried the day
because "Darwin's natural selection seemed to make sense to
those who could imagine its operations with the help of Darwin's
often-colorful metaphors."

Dear tells us that "the academic credentials of scientists and
the institutions at which they work are important parts of the
general credibility of science." Let us apply this claim to his
book, just as Dear applies it to science. We may assume that some
readers will be convinced of the credibility of his account, not
because of his rhetoric and imagination in reducing science solely
to the interface of its theories and methods, but because he is a
member of the Department of Science and Technology Studies at
Cornell University. Others, however, may have more compelling reasons.

Let us imagine one sort of reader who may give credence to Dear's
conclusions: a member of a school board in Kansas concerned about
the teaching of Darwinian theory. From Dear's book, that
school-board member learns that up until the 17th century, most
educated Europeans thought that developments in nature "could
be understood in terms of processes that aimed at some
purpose." Then suddenly the new mechanists challenged those who
saw design or purpose in the world, and a natural-philosophical
confrontation resulted that "had nothing to do with
disagreements over what phenomena there were in the world to be
explained." In the ensuing fight, ridicule became the weapon of
choice, used to particularly good effect by Descartes. Galileo was
also adept at caricature, depicting the Aristotelians as
"foolish." Indeed, Dear says, the major mechanists who
wish "to convict Aristotelian explanations of failing to make
sense" must "pillory them; there is no other recourse."

From reading Dear's book, perhaps the school-board member will come
to the following conclusions: Those who ridicule the inclusion of
intelligent design in the science curriculum are simply following
the tactics that were first inculcated by the founders of the
ideology of modern science. The mechanists' rhetorical excesses
against design led to the present-day distortions of evolutionary
biology. Therefore, teaching intelligent design may be the only way
forward in righting a historical wrong and reclaiming for science
and posterity the teleological wisdom that once enjoyed
intelligibility thanks to Aristotle.

Is this really the kind of history and philosophy of science we want
to prevail?